Processing Infrared Shots from a Converted Camera

This tutorial is for converting a "full spectrum" photograph into the classic blue sky/white vegetation result via channel swapping. If you are trying to convert a strictly infrared image (predominantly red) you will have to download Adobe's DNG Profile Editor and play with your image until it looks similar to our beginning point (light blue vegetation/ivory yellow skies).

Old Digital Camera Vs. Cell Phone: Sony Mavica Edition

Pause for a minute and try to remember 1997. It is very possible that you will not be able to remember everything about 1997 because it was a long time ago, but these things happened, among others: Bill Clinton started his second term as President of the United States, Dharma & Greg premiered on ABC, and everybody's computer came with a floppy disk drive.

Also in 1997, people started wondering if maybe this newfangled digital camera thing had legs. Turns out it did, but there are times in retrospect that you have to wonder how it managed to survive those early years. This is one of those times.

Black and white: optical filters in a digital world

Searching through the internet for a definitive answer on whether or not coloured optical filters still play a role in digital black and white provided an answer as clear as mud: yes, no, and everything inbetween. So let's see if we can find some clarity ourselves...

Old Digital Camera Vs. Cell Phone: Leica Digilux Zoom Edition

Your sassy new Leica DLUX5 is the latest in a long line of Leica-branded, Made-Somewhere-Else compact digital cameras. The most recent are sourced from Panasonic, but many moons ago, in the before times, Fuji was the OEM of choice. This Leica Digilux Zoom was Leica's second digital camera, an upscale clone of the Fujifilm MX-1700 from the halcyon days of 1999.

With a 1/2" 1.5 megapixel sensor, this is no DLUX5. But can it hold its own against a humble cell phone camera? Let's see!

Old Digital Camera Vs. Cell Phone: A Periodic Inquiry

The Nikon Coolpix 4500 was my very first digital camera, way back in 2002. It had a cool swivelling design, a 4 megapixel sensor, and a huge range of available accessories. It was one of the most capable non-SLR digital system cameras available.

It's been a while since the 4500 was state-of-the-art, and digital cameras have come a long way. But can this grandpa still compete? Let's see if it can beat the best-selling digital camera out there today: the one on your cell phone.

Tilt/Shift Lenses

Canon 24mm t/s - f3.5 - 1/1250 - 400 ISO

      A long time ago, before digital…even before roll film, all cameras tilted and shifted and correcting perspective was as important as focussing or selecting aperture and shutter speed.


     Then along came the newfangled "box" cameras (as opposed to bellows cameras) and with the rise of their popularity, the accessibilty to tilt and shift declined.

The Lomographic Spinner 360 gets a quick test

This is a Lomographic Spinner 360. It's a strange-looking thing covered in grippy studded rubber, with a huge protruding handle, gaping metal hood, exposed rubber-band gearing and a peculiar dangling pullstring.


It looks like what would happen if a computer tried to understand bdsm, gave up, and designed a bird instead.


But I can assure you that the Spinner 360 a camera, and a pretty interesting one at that: it takes full 360-degree panoramas on standard 35mm film.

A view from Mount Tolmie

Lens comparison: Leica-mount lenses

Leica-mount rangefinder lenses have a long history, stretching from the thread-mount lenses of the early 1930s to the modern Leitz and Zeiss/Voigtlander Cosina "M" bayonet lenses of the present day.

More to the point for the contemporary reader, the very earliest thread-mount lenses are still compatible (via adapters, of course) with the thoroughly modern Leica M, Micro Four Thirds, and Voigtlander cameras of today. So, new camera shoppers, this affects you directly.

I shoot with a rangefinder, and I think it's the finest sort of camera out there- but the lens selection can be so extensive that I often wonder what the difference might be between this lens and that one. And for the digital-only bunch out there, how do these lenses work on an affordable Micro Four Thirds camera? Are they worth considering?

So here we go: a quick comparison of seven different "standard" rangefinder lenses, from the 1930s to today. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE! It's curiosity. I think we've got a solid comparison going here, and I'll leave most of the conclusions to you. Full-resolution files are linked below, so have a look and decide for yourself.

And if you think that a 70-year-old lens has no relevance to modern cameras, you might want to keep reading (warning: image-heavy!)

"Will This Work??" Ektar 25 edition.

I remember shooting Ektar 25, long ago, in the before times. It was an ultra-fine-grained, saturated film with a vanishingly low ISO of 25- so you'd shoot it outdoors, on a sunny day, or you wouldn't shoot it at all. But if you had a lot of light, or if you were used to shooting Kodachrome anyway, Ektar 25 was the way to go. Kodak's new Ektar 100 (available in store) is a spiritual successor, but I still mourn Ektar 25's brief run.


That's why I was pleased to see this old roll walk through the door, squashed into the bottom corner of a neglected camera bag. It's been a while, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to load it up see if it would still capture a decent picture.


Why the question? Well first of all, it's obviously not had an easy life: the box is smashed and watermarked, and it had apparently been stored in a hot attic for at least the last few years. And second of all, this film is older than some of you:

Still worth a try, though. And the results?

New for rent: The Litepanels MicroPro Hybrid

The MicroPro Hybrid is a brand-new LED continuous lighting unit from Litepanels. Designed to run for hours off a set of common AA batteries, this compact unit is a cord-free, hands-free lighting solution that's designed for ease of use and portability.


Great for still or motion photography, the MicroPro Hybrid is now available for daily rentals. Read on for details!

The Great Chinon Chimera

You're looking at the Chinon CE-4s, a humble 35mm SLR with handsome-but-undistinguished styling and a solid-but-plasticky build. In its stock incarnation, it's a functional and reliable 35mm SLR with a flexible Pentax K mount and aperture-priority auto exposure. No, there's nothing at all unusual about the Chinon CE-4s.


Until someone makes it mad.

Three brand-new Samyang/Rokinon lenses you may want to consider

We've brought in a selection of unique Samyang/Rokinon lenses. These are very good quality Korean manual focus lenses, built of metal and high-quality plastic, with smooth focusing mechanisms and aspherical elements. Compact and well-made, they can help fill gaps in your lens lineup at a surprisingly affordable price.

What to do if your camera needs repair

As you're probably aware, we sell the vast majority of our used equipment with a warranty. We do this because we believe that you should be able to rely on any equipment that you buy, old or new, to do the job it's supposed to do.

That's why we do our best to test all the equipment we receive, and provide both a return period and a repair warranty on most of our gear. 

What resolution differences mean, with examples.

Digital cameras are marketed with such a heavy emphasis on resolution and megapixels that I thought it might be educational to see what the difference in resolution actually looks like.

With this in mind, we pulled together a collection of Nikon cameras spanning more than ten years, and we shot a few examples. Read on for samples.

New This Week: June 15-20th, 2009

We've been lucky this week to find two pristine classic Nikon cameras: a late-model F Photomic, and a very nice example of the great F2.

Our Nikon F Photomic is a 1971 model, built 12 years into the F's remarkably long production run. Solid and versatile, the F was the de facto professional standard for years- until it was succeeded in 1972 by the F2. Our example is in excellent cosmetic shape, with a fully tested and accurate shutter and meter. It's priced at $349.

The Nikon F2 was a conservative evolution of the F, but managed to improve upon it in nearly every way. More heavily built, with a wider range of shutter speeds, and an even more extensive system of accessories, the F2 is still one of Nikon's finest and most usable SLRs. Our example is in great shape, cosmetically and mechanically, and includes a 50mm f2 Nikkor lens in similar shape. It's available now for $379.
This 35mm f2 Super-Takumar lens is another new arrival. Heavily built, with a huge front element, this lens looks great and takes lovely pictures. Like any M42 screw-mount lens, this 35mm f2 Super-Takumar can be used on the original Pentax Spotmatic and S-series cameras, as well as on any K-mount or EOS-mount camera- film or digital- with an inexpensive adapter (not included). This is an uncommon lens, and likely won't stick around too long. Available now for $249.
Finally, my favourite "toy" camera to come along in some time, the Golden Half is back in stock. Tiny and remarkably solid, the Golden Half is a plastic half-frame camera with fixed focus, adjustable aperture, and a side-mounted flash shoe. It's a lot smaller than you'd think, and a whole lot of fun to use. Half-frame shooting means that you double the number of pictures you can take per roll, saving on film and creating cool diptychs when you print the images together:

The Golden Half is in stock at $69, including a roll of colour film.

Check our website at www.camera-traders.com or stop into the store to see more of our inventory!

5th Annual Camera Swap Meet, May 24th, 2009

Join us on Sunday, May 24th from 10AM to 3PM for our 5th Annual Camera Swap Meet! Held in the Market Square courtyard, the Swap Meet gather sellers from Vancouver Island, the Mainland, and the Pacific Northwest for a day of camera-related fun, with plenty of collectibles and useful bits & pieces available for sale.

Clicking on the picture above will take you to the info page on our website, where you can contact us for more information or to reserve a table.

See you there!

What's new this week - February 17th, 2009

The Chamonix 045-N1 is a new, ultra-light-weight 4x5 camera built of hardwood, aluminum alloy and carbon fibre. This is a beautifully made field camera that weighs only as much as a professional digital SLR and accommodates lenses up to about 300mm- and down to approximately 90mm thanks to the upgraded "deluxe" bellows.

A leather "wrap" case, two #0 lensboards, and one #1 lensboard are included. This is an excellent opportunity to pick up one of these cameras: the waiting list for new ones is about 4-6 months long! Our price is $899.

The Rollei 35 is a classic compact 35mm pocket camera, with full manual aperture and shutter speed control. The lens is a Schneider-Kreuznach 40mm f3.5 S-Xenar, a rare variant made for only two years. Unusual for the Rollei 35, this example has a fully functioning- and accurate- lightmeter. All shutter speeds, including the low speeds, are accurate, and the camera is in excellent cosmetic shape. Our price is $139.

This 20mm f3.5 Nikkor-UD lens is an AI-converted wide-angle optic with a surprisingly huge front element (and 72mm filter thread), excellent sharpness, and a great distortion-free image. This lens will work on any manual-focus Nikon camera, as well as the D200, D300, D700 and the professional D1/D2/D3 series with full metering function (but, of course, manual focus). Our price is $229.

Finally, we have a like-new Cosina/Voigtlander 75mm f2.5 Color Heliar lens in Leica M39 thread mount. A brilliant short telephoto lens, this is a great optic for portraits: sharp, relatively fast, and easy to handle. It can be used on any Leica thread-mount camera, as well as M-mount cameras- including the Voigtlander R series and the newer Zeiss-Ikon range- with a simple adapter (not included.) This lens is like-new in its original box, pretty much without a scratch, and our price is $299.

These and plenty more new items are available on our website at www.camera-traders.com.

What is the deal with our 85mm f2.8 PC-Micro-Nikkor?

I've been asked for some samples of what our rental lenses are capable of- specifically, the 85mm f2.8 PC-Micro-Nikkor.


In addition to being an exceptionally sharp macro lens, the PC-Micro-Nikkor's big tricks are its tilt/shift abilities. What these allow is greater control over distortion and plane of focus, similar to what large-format cameras are capable of.

Shifting moves the lens off its axis, in any direction. This is mostly useful for architectural photography, but it can also be used to slide your viewpoint off-axis without moving the camera. So if you need to take a picture featuring some kind of reflective surface, and you want to make sure the camera doesn't appear in the image, shifting the lens may let you get away with it.

Tilting is more interesting for creative photography. When you take a picture, the area in focus is a slice of your subject parallel to the film or sensor plane. To illustrate:


If you tilt the lens, the area in focus tilts, too. So instead of having that in-focus area parallel to the sensor plane, you can lay it down against your subject so that more appears in focus:


Both of these ruler pictures were taken at the same aperture from the same spot.

Especially useful for macrophotography, where depth of focus can be a real problem, you can also get great effects from this technique in portraiture and landscapes. National Geographic published an excellent Hurricane Katrina photo essay taken with a Speed Graphic large-format camera, which features the kind of selective focus effects the 85mm f2.8 PC-Micro-Nikkor is capable of.

Part of our rental fleet, the 85mm f2.8 PC-Micro-Nikkor rents for $35/day.

Digital infrared: a how-to guide

Infrared photography is getting more and more popular, and with good reason: it's a lot of fun, and can give some fantastic effects. There are plenty of ways to shoot infrared, both film and digital. Our last update mentioned our stock of infrared film, which makes shooting IR pictures as easy as dropping a roll of film in your camera and attaching a filter.

But if you want to shoot digitally, you've got a few options. Digital sensors are actually very sensitive to infrared light, and the only reason you can't just go ahead shoot IR with most cameras is a simple filter placed in front of the sensor. So to shoot infrared with a digital camera, the trick is to somehow remove that filter.

You can have a DSLR modified- an expensive proposition- or you can use a simple point-and-shoot camera and get a similar effect. So today I'm going to go the digital route and show you how to modify an old point-and-shoot camera to capture IR images. It's cheap, and it' fun. We'll start with an old digital point-and-shoot camera, in this case a Toshiba PDR-M70. The PDR-M70 is a chunky old camera that has the good fortune of borrowing the lens and sensor assembly of the Canon G1, one of my favourite digital cameras. It has a nice high-speed f2.0-f3.0 zoom lens and a sensor which, at least at its base ISO, produces pretty solid pictures. And now we're going to cut it open.

You'll need the camera itself, a screwdriver, a piece of glass (I've used an old skylight filter), a glass cutter, a piece of exposed film leader, and some tape. You may also want to have some tweezers on hand.

1) Remove the battery to prevent damage to the camera and yourself.


2) Remove the screws that hold the camera together.


You may want to place the screws in a convenient film container so they don't get lost.


3) Gently take the camera's two halves apart.


Don't yank: you may have missed a screw or, depending on the camera you're dissecting, you may have to pry some plastic clips open before the two halves can be separated.

DO NOT TOUCH THE FLASH CAPACITOR OR ITS CONNECTORS!! Basically do not touch anything in the flash assembly: even though the battery is removed, it can still give you a rough shock.


4) The PDR-M70 is mercifully simple inside, and the sensor assembly is easily visible as soon as you split the casing (apologies for the blurry image.)


Unclip the data cable leading to the sensor assembly and move it aside.


5) Remove the screws holding the sensor to the lens assembly and store the screws in another film case.


6) Gently lift the sensor off the lens assembly.


7) The blue glass filter you see here is the IR filter. You'll need to remove it, and in this camera, it's a simple matter of popping it out with a screwdriver. Your camera may differ.


8) Here's the filter out of the camera.


Place the filter on your replacement glass, and trace its outline


9) Score the glass along your traced lines, and snap it.

Be careful with this step, because you're going to end up with a sharp-edged glass square and a bunch of smaller glass bits. Here is the new filter next to the old one:


10) Drop the new filter into the recess previously occupied by the IR filter.


Here it is properly seated:


11) now you just need to reverse the disassembly and put the camera back together.

Click.

12) Now we make an IR-pass filter for the front of the lens, to minimize the amount of visible light reaching the sensor. You can buy a proper glass IR filter, or do it the cheap way with a piece of exposed colour negative film.


Just cut it to fit, and tape it to the front of the lens.


Looks ridiculous, but it works: the true spirit of DIY. You can also use a completely black frame of slide film, but don't use black and white film, because it's not gonna work.

13) That's it! The camera is done.


You now have a fully functional camera that shoots infrared pictures like this:


More here.

If you take on this project, be aware that the camera you choose to modify will probably be constructed differently than the PDR-M70 I used, so some of the steps I've listed above may differ. And your camera may require some sensor adjustment to get the focus correct (the softness in the IR pictures above is due mostly to a sensor that still needs a bit of prodding)

It's not dead simple, but basically, if you're inclined to tinkering, you should be able to figure it out. GIve it a try!

What's new this week - January 19th

We have a bunch of interesting film and a few cool cameras to talk about this week.

Cameras first: we have a nice Voigtlander Bessa R2A, one of the newer Voigtlander-branded Cosina rangefinder cameras.

These are modern rangefinder cameras with the standard Leica M-mount bayonet, TTL meters, and a big, clear viewfinder. They're compatible with nearly every Leica M lens out there, plus a multitude of 39mm screw-mount lenses available for earlier cameras. They're well-made, metal-bodied cameras- I've been using a similar R3M for a few years now, and it's been nothing but reliable.

The R2A has an electronically-controlled shutter, and operates in full manual or aperture-priority mode. If you've never used a rangefinder camera before, come in and have a look- the R2A is a good one, and sells for a fraction of what a similarly-specced Leica would. Our Voigtlander Bessa R2A is in excellent condition both cosmetically and functionally, and is priced at a very reasonable $369.

The second camera is a bit of an older one:

This is a very clean Zeiss-Ikon Ikonta 524/2, a classic 6x9cm medium-format folding camera. It has a clean 105mm f3.5 Novar Anastigmat lens, fully functional shutter, and a built-in uncoupled rangefinder. These old folding cameras are great, shooting huge pictures on 120 rollfilm and collapsing down to a size that's easily packable into nearly any camera bag (or pocket, I suppose, if your coat is big enough.) This Ikonta is in-store now and priced at $129.

On the film front, we've brought in a selection of some harder-to-find emulsions, including three different varieties of infrared film.

Ilford SFX200 is an ISO200 black-and-white film sensitive to wavelengths up to roughly 790nm. We have SFX200 available in both 35mm and 120 formats.

Rollei IR400 is a slightly faster film with approximately the same infrared sensitivity as the Ilford SFX200. We have only 35mm cartridges of the Rollei IR400 at the moment, but we'll be getting more 120 soon.

Efke IR820 is not an ISO820 film: the name refers to its infrared sensitivity, which at 820nm makes this more of a "true" infrared film than either the Ilford or the Rollei. Efke IR820 is available in 35mm and 120 formats.

Rollei Digibase is a special C41-process black and white emulsion specifically designed for scanning. Its polyester base has no colour mask, and lies flatter than standard film bases to ensure edge-to-edge sharpness. Available in 35mm and 120 formats.

And finally, for the classic camera fans, a special treat:

127 film! This is a smaller rollfilm format used by Rolleiflex 44 and Yashica 44 cameras, as well as many other older cameras. This is not a common film- the 127 format has been out of mass production for more than a decade now- but Efke still makes it, and we've got some. It's a nice-quality ISO100 black and white film, with a silver-rich emulsion that gives great classic-looking photos.

That's it for this week. Be sure to check our used inventory at www.camera-traders.com for all the rest of our stock- and contact us if you have any questions about these or other cameras.